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CHAPTER 1

HOW GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH?

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good — except God alone."

MARK 10:18

As I was sitting in the doctor's waiting room one day, my eye was drawn to a remarkable picture of a man being sculpted. The sculpture was complete down to about midthigh, and the finished work showed a very robust and muscular man with the kind of physique all men would like to have. The striking thing about the picture, however, was that the artist had put the hammer and chisel in the hands of the man being sculpted.

I was fascinated by the picture and wondered what message the artist was trying to convey. Perhaps he was trying to paint a picture of the so-called self-made man. As I studied the picture, however, I marveled at how it did depict so well the way many Christians try to live the Christian life. We try to change ourselves. We take what we think are the tools of spiritual transformation into our own hands and try to sculpt ourselves into robust Christlike specimens. But spiritual transformation is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the Master Sculptor.

However, we must not press this analogy too far. The picture was of a block of marble being sculpted into a man. Both the original piece of marble and the finished product were inert, lifeless forms. That is not true in our case. We are endowed with reason, emotions, and a will, all of which were renewed at the time we trusted Christ for salvation, and which the Holy Spirit works through as He involves us in the transforming process.

The Holy Spirit's work in transforming us more and more into the likeness of Christ is called sanctification. Our involvement and cooperation with Him in His work is what I call the pursuit of holiness. That expression is not original with me. Rather, it is taken from Hebrews 12:14: "Make every effort [literally: pursue] ... to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord."

The pursuit of holiness requires sustained and vigorous effort. It allows for no indolence, no lethargy, no half-hearted commitment, and no laissez-faire attitude toward even the smallest sins. In short, it demands the highest priority in the life of a Christian, because to be holy is to be like Christ — God's goal for every Christian.

The word pursue in this context means to strive to gain or accomplish. Note the strong verb strive. As we have already seen, the Greek word for pursue is translated "make every effort" in Hebrews 12:14. In Philippians 3:12-14, it is translated "press on." The most common use of it in the New Testament, however, is translated "persecute" and carries the common meaning of that word — to track down in order to harm or destroy. It is a very vigorous word.

At the same time, however, the pursuit of holiness must be anchored in the grace of God; otherwise it is doomed to failure. That statement probably strikes many people as strange. A lot of Christians seem to think that the grace of God and the vigorous pursuit of holiness are antithetical — that is, in direct and unequivocal opposition to one another.

To some, the pursuit of holiness sounds like legalism and man-made rules. To others, an emphasis on grace seems to open the door to irresponsible, sinful behavior based on the notion that God's unconditional love means we are free to sin as we please.

Some years ago, I wrote a book titled The Pursuit of Holiness in which I strongly emphasized our responsibility for holiness as opposed to the concept of just turning it all over to God. Thirteen years later I wrote another book, Transforming Grace, in which I urged believers to learn to live by grace, not by performance. After Transforming Grace was published, many people asked me how it related to The Pursuit of Holiness. The question always seemed to carry the suggestion that grace and the pursuit of holiness are incompatible. One lady even went so far as to wonder how the same person who wrote the book on holiness could possibly have written a book on grace.

Grace and the personal discipline required to pursue holiness, however, are not opposed to one another. In fact, they go hand in hand. An understanding of how grace and personal, vigorous effort work together is essential for a lifelong pursuit of holiness. Yet many believers do not understand what it means to live by grace in their daily lives, and they certainly don't understand the relationship of grace to personal discipline.

Consider two radically different days in your own life. The first one is a good day spiritually for you. You get up promptly when your alarm goes off and have a refreshing and profitable quiet time as you read your Bible and pray. Your plans for the day generally fall into place, and you somehow sense the presence of God with you. To top it off, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is truly searching. As you talk with the person, you silently pray for the Holy Spirit to help you and to also work in your friend's heart.

The second day is just the opposite. You don't arise at the first ring of your alarm. Instead, you shut it off and go back to sleep. When you finally awaken, it's too late to have a quiet time. You hurriedly gulp down some breakfast and rush off to the day's activities. You feel guilty about oversleeping and missing your quiet time, and things just generally go wrong all day. You become more and more irritable as the day wears on, and you certainly don't sense God's presence in your life. That evening, however, you quite unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is really interested in receiving Christ as Savior.

Would you enter those two witnessing opportunities with a different degree of confidence? Would you be less confident on the bad day than on the good day? Would you find it difficult to believe that God would bless you and use you in the midst of a rather bad spiritual day?

If you answered yes to those questions, you have lots of company among believers. I've described these two scenarios to a number of audiences and asked, "Would you respond differently?" Invariably, about 80 percent indicate that they would. They would be less confident of God's blessing while sharing Christ at the end of a bad day than they would after a good one. Is such thinking justified? Does God work that way? The answer to both questions is no, because God's blessing does not depend on our performance.

Why then do we think this way? It is because we do believe that God's blessing on our lives is somehow conditioned upon our spiritual performance. If we've performed well and had a "good" day, we assume we are in a position for God to bless us. Oh, we know God's blessings come to us through Christ, but we also have this vague but very real notion that they are also conditioned on our behavior. A friend of mine used to think, If I do certain things, then I can get God to come through for me.

Such thinking is even stronger when we've had a "bad" day. There is virtually no doubt in our minds that we have forfeited God's favor for some period of time, most likely until the next day. I've asked people why they think God would probably not use them to share the gospel with someone on a "bad" day. A typical reply is, "I wouldn't be worthy," or "I wouldn't be good enough."

Such a reply reveals an all-too-common misconception of the Christian life: the thinking that, although we are saved by grace, we earn or forfeit God's blessings in our daily lives by our performance.

A BAD DAY

So what should we do when we've had a "bad" day spiritually, when it seems we've done everything wrong and are feeling very guilty? We must go back to the cross and see Jesus there bearing our sins in His own body (1 Peter 2:24). We must by faith appropriate for ourselves the blood of Christ that will cleanse our guilty consciences (see Hebrews 9:14).

For example, in the bad-day scenario I've described, we might pray to God something like the following:

Father, I have sinned against You. I've been negligent in the spiritual disciplines that I know are necessary and helpful for my spiritual growth. I've been irritable and impatient toward those around me. I've allowed resentful and unkind thoughts to lodge in my mind. I repent of these sins and claim Your forgiveness.

You have said You justify the wicked (Romans 4:5). Father, in view of my sins today, I acknowledge that in myself I am wicked. In fact, my problem is not merely the sins I've committed, some of which I may not even be aware of, but the fact that my heart is sinful. These sins I am so painfully conscious of now are merely the expressions of my sinful heart.

But despite my sins and my sinfulness, You have said, "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). Given my acute awareness of my sin just now, that seems to be an incredible statement. How can I be without condemnation when I have so flagrantly and willfully sinned against You today?

O Father, I know it is because Jesus bore the sins I've committed today in His body on the cross. He suffered the punishment I deserve, so that I might experience the blessings He deserved. So I come to You, dear Father, and in Jesus' name I ask You to enable me to effectively share the gospel with this friend just now.

You can readily see by the spirit of humility expressed in that prayer that I am not proposing a cavalier attitude toward sin. Rather, I am saying that God's grace through Christ is greater than our sin, even on our worst days. To experience that grace, however, we must lay hold of it by faith in Christ and His death on our behalf. Now, your particular prayer may not be as long as the one I've written. The issue is not how long your prayer is; it is the attitude of your heart. Do the sentiments expressed in that prayer reflect your heart attitude? I have read that every time the great nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon stepped into the pulpit, he did so with the silent prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13, KJV). Spurgeon's one-sentence prayer captures all I've expressed in four paragraphs.

You can pray a prayer like this whenever you are acutely aware of your need of God's intervening grace and at the same time are painfully aware of your total undeservedness of that grace. In fact, we obviously should not wait until we have a need for God to bless us. We should pray such a prayer of repentance and faith just to have our consciences cleansed from all sin and to walk in fellowship with God.

A GOOD DAY

Now, let's go back to the good-day scenario, the day when your spiritual disciplines are all in place and you are reasonably satisfied with your Christian performance. Have you thereby earned God's blessing that day? Will God be pleased to bless you because you've been good? You are probably thinking, Well, when you put it like that, the answer is no. But doesn't God only work through clean vessels? To which I reply, "Let's assume that is true. How good then do you have to be to be a clean vessel? How good is good enough?"

When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus, "'Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?' Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself'" (Matthew 22:36-39).

Using Jesus' response to the Pharisee as a standard, how good has your good day been? Have you perfectly kept those two commandments? If not, does God grade on a curve? Is 90 percent a passing grade with God? We know the answers to those questions, don't we? We know that Jesus said, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). And we remember that James wrote, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it" (James 2:10).

The point of this good-day-bad-day comparison is this: Regardless of our performance, we are always dependent on God's grace, His undeserved favor to those who deserve His wrath. Some days we may be more acutely conscious of our sinfulness and hence more aware of our need of His grace, but there is never a day when we can stand before Him on our own two feet of performance, when we are worthy enough to deserve His blessing.

At the same time, the good news of the gospel is that God's grace is available on our worst days. That is true because Christ Jesus fully satisfied the claims of God's justice and fully paid the penalty of a broken law when He died on the cross in our place. Because of that the apostle Paul could write, "He forgave us all our sins" (Colossians 2:13).

Does the fact that God has forgiven us all our sins mean that He no longer cares whether we obey or disobey? Not at all. The Scripture speaks of our grieving the Holy Spirit through our sins (Ephesians 4:30). And Paul prayed that we "may please [God] in every way" (Colossians 1:10). We grieve God and we please God. Clearly, He cares about our conduct and will discipline us when we refuse to repent of conscious sin. But God is no longer our Judge. Through Christ, He is now our heavenly Father who disciplines us only out of love and only for our good.

If God's blessings were dependent on our performance, they would be meager indeed. Even our best works are shot through with sin — with varying degrees of impure motives and lots of imperfect performance. We are always, to some degree, looking out for ourselves, guarding our flanks, protecting our egos. It is because we do not realize the utter depravity of the principle of sin that remains in us and stains everything we do that we entertain any notion of earning God's blessings through our obedience. And it is because we do not fully grasp the fact that Jesus paid the penalty for all our sins that we despair of God's blessing when we have failed to live up to even our own desires to live a life that is pleasing to God.

Here is an important spiritual principle that sums up what I've said thus far:

Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace.

Every day of our Christian experience should be a day of relating to God on the basis of His grace alone. We are not only saved by grace, but we also live by grace every day. This grace comes through Christ, "through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand" (Romans 5:2, emphasis added).

A significant part of the Mosaic law was the promise of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (see Deuteronomy 28, especially verses 1-2 and 15). Some Christians live as if that principle applies to them today. But Paul said that "the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith" (Galatians 3:24). Christ has already borne the curses for our disobedience and earned for us the blessings of obedience. As a result, we are now to look to Christ alone — not Christ plus our performance — for God's blessings in our lives. We are saved by grace and we are to live by grace alone.

When we pray to God for His blessing, He does not examine our performance to see if we are worthy. Rather, He looks to see if we are trusting in the merit of His Son as our only hope for securing His blessing. To repeat: We are saved by grace, and we are to live by grace every day of our Christian lives.

If it is true that our relationship with God is based on His grace instead of our performance, why then are we so prone to fall into the good-day-bad-day type of thinking? It is because we have relegated the gospel to the unbeliever.

A LIFETIME MESSAGE

Consider a simple time line of your life as shown by the following illustration. It has only three points of time: your birth, your death, and the day of your salvation. Regardless of your age when you trusted Christ, the Cross divides your whole life into two periods: you as an unbeliever and you as a believer.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Discipline of Grace"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Jerry Bridges.
Excerpted by permission of NavPress.
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